Offline consolidation of procedural skill learning is enhanced by negative emotional content.
Summary of "Offline consolidation of procedural skill learning is enhanced by negative emotional content."
It is now well established that both procedural skills and episodic memories consolidate across periods of offline retention, and most particularly across periods of sleep. Such consolidation has been demonstrated to be more marked for emotional than for neutral episodes, but the interaction between emotionality and the offline consolidation of procedural skills has yet to be investigated. Here, we address this issue by examining the impact of an emotional background context at encoding upon the subsequent consolidation of mirror tracing, a well-studied procedural skill. We also consider the importance of sleep for such consolidation by manipulating the retention interval (over a day, overnight, or over 24 h containing normal sleep). Our data show significantly greater offline improvements in the accuracy of mirror tracing when negative emotional content is present during the training phase when compared to when neutral or positive content is present. Furthermore, consolidation across a night of sleep is associated with faster and more accurate performance than consolidation across a day of wakefulness. These novel findings show that the emotional context in which a procedural skill is learned can impact upon subsequent offline consolidation.
Affiliation
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, WC1N 3AR, London, UK, a.h.javadi@gmail.com.
Journal Details
This article was published in the following journal.
Name: Experimental brain research. Experimentelle Hirnforschung. Experimentation cerebrale
ISSN: 1432-1106
Pages:
Links
- PubMed Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21120459
- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00221-010-2497-7
Medical and Biotech [MESH] Definitions
Emotional Intelligence
The ability to understand and manage emotions and to use emotional knowledge to enhance thought and deal effectively with tasks. Components of emotional intelligence include empathy, self-motivation, self-awareness, self-regulation, and social skill. Emotional intelligence is a measurement of one's ability to socialize or relate to others.
Transfer (psychology)
Change in learning in one situation due to prior learning in another situation. The transfer can be positive (with second learning improved by first) or negative (where the reverse holds).
Knowledge Of Results (psychology)
A principle that learning is facilitated when the learner receives immediate evaluation of learning performance. The concept also hypothesizes that learning is facilitated when the learner is promptly informed whether a response is correct, and, if incorrect, of the direction of error.
Discrimination Learning
Learning that is manifested in the ability to respond differentially to various stimuli.
Serial Learning
Learning to make a series of responses in exact order.
PubMed Articles
The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate the effects of emotional interference on consolidation of sequential learning. In different sessions, 6 groups of subjects were initially train...
Procedural learning and dyslexia.
Three major 'neural systems', specialized for different types of information processing, are the sensory, declarative, and procedural systems. It has been proposed (Trends Neurosci., 30(4), 135-141) t...
Both sleep and wakefulness support consolidation of continuous, goal-directed, visuomotor skill.
Sleep has been shown to benefit memory consolidation for certain motor skills, but it remains unclear if this relationship exists for motor skills with direct rehabilitation applications. We aimed to...
Learning in autism: implicitly superb.
BACKGROUND: Although autistic people have shown impairments in various learning and memory tasks, recent studies have reported mixed findings concerning implicit learning in ASD. Implicit skill learni...
Sleep-related memory consolidation in primary insomnia.
Summary It has been suggested that healthy sleep facilitates the consolidation of newly acquired memories and underlying brain plasticity. The authors tested the hypothesis that patients with primary...
Clinical Trials
Procedural Learning in Participants With ADHD
Skill acquisition refers to the process of improvement of performance following practice experience. This process is the basis for generation of a long-lasting memory. Individuals with Att...
Effects of Eszopiclone on Sleep-dependent Learning in Schizophrenia
This study will determine whether eszopiclone will normalize sleep patterns and restore sleep-dependent enhancement of motor skill learning in patients with schizophrenia. The investigator...
Purpose: This study is designed to assess the impact of teaching tracheal intubation using video-guided feedback on the ability to perform and maintain this clinical skill by medical stud...
The purpose of the study is to examine the effect of an intervention to improve walking based on motor learning (skill-based) compared to the usual intervention (strength, flexibility and...
ALL2008 Protocol for Childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) - 6MP Consolidation Therapy
The purpose of this study is to increase the fraction of patients, who become MRD-negative during consolidation for the non-HR ALL group through individualized intensification of the 6MP-d...
